Place: UK

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Kenya, Mexico, and the UK!

This week, our editors bring news of literary realms colliding, collaborating, and interchanging in future- and truth-seeking dialogues. In Kenya, a titan in publishing is commemorated, and a Nobel Laureate establishes presence in a Swahili translation. In Mexico, World Poetry Day is celebrated wit aplomb. And in the UK, the London Book Fair brings vital interrogations pertaining to literary translation in the age of AI. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from for Kenya

To paraphrase V.S. Naipaul, the world is what it is, and men who allow themselves to become something have a place in it. Such men, when death waylays them, come to define particular eras. Henry Chakava, a pioneer African publisher, is such a man.

On Sunday, March 24, Chakava was laid to rest. For a man who, from a young age and until his untimely demise, redefined publishing in Africa in many ways: publishing in Swahili and promoting publishing in African languages, focusing on educational publishing to promote literacy, diversifying traditional publishing to incorporate new literary thought besides the infamous African Writers Series. With this legacy, his death attracted reverential eulogies from across the book and knowledge industry. He had become the face of African book publishing when he became the managing director of Heinemann Educational Books, which he would eventually steer to a new dispensation under the banner of East African Educational Publishers, and his work endeared him to many in Africa and beyond, attracting global assignments including being named the chairman of Global Book Alliance in 2021. An ode to Chakava, surely, cannot be captured by a word-bound dispatch. All in all, go well, Chakava. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from Greece, Palestine, the UK, and Spain!

The week, we bring more updates from writers around the globe as they continue to commemorate, resist, show solidarity, and contemplate our present moment. In Greece, the literary world remembers the historic Athens Polytechnic Uprising; in the UK, the prestigious Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is awarded; in Spain, an exciting young literary festival brings together some of the best names in Spanish-language writing today, to talk about that eternal subject—time; and lastly, our editor from Palestine expresses gratitude for those around the world who have continued to stand up and show support.

Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Greece

The book Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales was recently translated from English into Greek by Dimitris Koufontinas and published by Monopati Editions. In the collection, editors Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana have gathered and selected stories from Palestine that best exemplify the Palestinian Arab folk oral tradition, and the translation represents an important addition for Palestinian and Arab literature in the Greek language.

Recently, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic Uprising (1973), Giorgos Perantonakis wrote an article for Book Press, highlighting the continual legacy that this demonstration—and the dictatorship, the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974), that it protested—has left on Greek literature, citing important works from poetry and novels to personal memoirs. However, Perantonakis omitted one of the most important anti-dictatorial titles: Ta Dekaokto Kimena (The Eighteen Texts), a collective volume of eighteen writers (including Georgios Seferis, Manolis Anagnostakis, and Stratis Tsirkas) and their political works, which was published in July 1970 by Kedros Publications. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary news from Palestine, Bulgaria, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring you the latest news from Bulgaria, Palestine, and the Philippines! From a major award win to exciting literary festivals, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Bulgaria

On Wednesday, May 24, most Bulgarians woke up later than usual. After all, the country was commemorating its Alphabet, Enlightenment, and Culture Day, and the festivities would not begin before noon. The night owls, however, had already started celebrating much earlier as media outlets from all over the globe notified them that, at a ceremony in Central London, writer Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel had been awarded the 2023 International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022) whose primary focus is the “weaponization of nostalgia.” The duo, whom Asymptote has previously highlighted, gave a heartfelt speech about the stories that keep us alive and resist evil.

Later the same day, Gospodinov posted on his official Facebook page: “Blessed holiday! Blessed miracle of language! I was lucky enough to say these words in Bulgarian last night at the Booker Prize ceremony in the heart of London! On the eve of the most beautiful holiday! I wrote this book with the thirty letters of the Cyrillic alphabet. I am grateful to everyone who believed in it! To my readers with whom we have been together for years. It was and still is a long road. To the writers before me from whom I have learned! To the Bulgarian writers for all they have suffered and written. I am grateful for the joy I saw in Bulgaria after the announcement of the award last night. Joy because of a book is pure joy. Thank you! It is possible! May it open the door to Bulgarian culture and give us courage.”

Courage, if I may add, to remain sensitive to life’s delicate intricacies. Courage to be mindful of the past in our eternal battle for the future. Courage to translate even the “unspoken speeches for all unreceived awards.”

And the rest is history. READ MORE…

Asymptote at the Movies: Blow-Up

Ultimately, both Antonioni’s cinematic approach and Cortázar’s literary vision are simply two sides of the same coin.

Michelangelo Antonioni and Julio Cortázar form our double feature for this latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies—a perfect pairing in their own idiosyncratic way, as two auteurs who both formidably challenged the responsibilities and capacities of their mediums. Cortázar’s “Les babas del diablo” was published in 1959, and a short six years later, Antonioni’s Blow-Up hit the theatres. Both works have at their centre a photographer: Cortázar’s narrator, Michel; and Antonioni’s protagonist, Thomas. Both also see their leading men stumble across something sinister, which drastically—and perhaps irreversibly—alter their engagement with their respective realities. Cortázar and Antonioni have both declaimed any other significant crossover between their works, and indeed they seem to have little more in common besides an overarching narrative catalyst. . . but isn’t there always more to be found when two intelligences are in dialogue? In the following roundtable, Chris Tănăsescu, Thuy Dinh, Xiao Yue Shan, and Rubén López discuss these two masterpieces, their phenomenology, and how the mode of translation works between them.

Chris Tănăsescu (CT): I read Cortázar’s story only after watching the movie—actually, after watching Blow-Up multiple times over the years. But I believe this is far from being the only reason why, when I did finally read the Cortázar text, it seemed to me that the story had been written after the movie, and not the movie that was based on—or rather, “inspired by”—the story . . . The story struck me as a piece I would have expected Antonioni to write himself. “This is Antonioni,” I thought to myself . . . His cinematic poetics, the style and language (of characters in various movies of his, quite a number of them writers or artists), even his obsessive motifs (such as composition versus/and/as the machine) were all there. What’s more, Cortázar’s speaker’s moody, stylistic, grammatical, translational, topographical, and voyeuristic flaneuring seemed like the perfect illustration [and at times even (re)wording] of some of Antonioni’s most well-known statements about the art of modern filmmaking; particularly the ones in which he ponders over the director’s mission to capture a never-static flux-like reality by continuously staying in motion and incessantly gravitating towards, and away from, moments of potential crystallization. The “arriving and moving on, as a new perception.”

Thuy Dinh (TD): I prefer to think that each work—whether the film or the story—exists independently of each other, with its own unique language and attributes, yet can converse with or sustain the other like a dance, a collaboration, or an equitable marriage: where no one has, or wishes, to have the upper hand. This idea of conversation seems more inclusive, and helps us to gain a more holistic view of what we call “reality,” don’t you think—especially since both Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Cortázar’s “Las babas del diablo” squarely address the limitations of subjectivity and/or the inherent instability of any narrative approach, and in so doing invite the audience/reader to accept the fluidity of all human experiences?

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): This concept of dialogic resonance operating inside the small words “inspired by” is so discombobulating and vast, it’s a shame that we only have the linear conceit of before and after to refer to it—but before and after it is. Chris, even though as you so precisely pointed out, the film is rife with Antonioni and his inquiries (that of the despair innate in sexual elation, that “memory offers no guarantees,” and that hallucinogenic quality of modern opulence), I think at the centre of his Blow-Up is this idea that life is always interrupted with seeing, and seeing always interrupted with life, and this is, I believe, a direct carry-over from Cortázar’s mesmerising, illusive tale of what it means when the gift of sight is led through the twisted chambers of seeing. Which is to say, I agree with both of you, that at the confluence of these two works lie a similar attention to fluidity. READ MORE…

All Hail the Summer 2022 Issue!

Featuring Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bernhard, Maureen Freely, and a spotlight on Swiss literature

You here for the party? Step this way! Bigger than any conversation pit, our newly furnished Summer 2022 edition boasts a staggering thirty-one-country capacity. From Austria, expect a darkly gossipy Elfriede Jelinek, who will be bringing along her whiny friend Thomas Bernhard (Tom doesn’t get out of his house too much, and it shows). Representing Algeria on the other hand is Habib Tengour; there he is, showing off a beloved trinket! Best known for introducing Orhan Pamuk to English readers, Maureen Freely is also in the house, regaling everyone with tales from her Istanbul childhood. In the corner, we have a cluster of French-, German-, and Italian-speaking guests huddled over a platter of cheese. One of them happens to be cheese expert Anaïs Meier, who swears by her compatriots’ rich inner lives (very much on display in the Swiss Literature Feature, sponsored by Pro Helvetia): “As a Swiss gets older, the outer rind toughens, but in their heart the cheese continues to seethe, hot and liquid.”

The game we’ll be playing tonight is Spot the Mise en Abyme! In case you don’t know the term, it literally means “placed in the abyss”; go here for examples of this mirroring literary device. How about one from the issue itself to get you started? See the Tower of Babel right there on the cover, gorgeously illustrated by Seattle-based guest artist Lu Liu? It’s picked up in the beautifully expansive poem by Almog Behar and again in the poignant nonfiction by Jimin Kang, before being reflected back in this Tower of Babel-like gathering of eighteen languages. (After all, according to Mexican essayist Andrea Chapela, “All this language is like a game of mirrors, multiplying to infinity whatever it touches.”) The guest who emails, with substantiation, the most mises en abyme—across all the texts in the new issue—by 30 August will win a prize worth USD50, along with publication in our blog.

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What’s New with the Crew? (May 2022)

Despite a quarter marked by global upheaval, our team members continued to publish and organize literary events

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, recently co-organized—jointly with Isabelle Gribomont—an international week-long event on Literature and Computation which he capped off with an intermedia computational performance titled Code Is Poetry.

Blog Editor Darren Huang reviewed Diana Abu-Jaber’s “Fencing with the King” for the Los Angeles Review of Books on April 1.

In March, Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursac was asked by the ALTA board to come back as interim president, after Anne Fisher resigned as president following the invasion of Ukraine. Elias-Bursac will serve in this capacity until November 2023.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood’s joint translation (with Peter Sherwood) of her mother’s memoirs My Seven Lives: Jana Juráňová  in Conversation with Agneša Kalinová, published by Purdue University Press last October, was launched at an event in London on  April 27.

Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new braided essay out in The Rupture and a short story in The Baltimore Review.

Assistant Managing Editor Marina Dora Martino’s poem “Death with Three Left Feet” was published in POETRY’s April issue, Exophony, featuring poets who write in English as an additional language.

Assistant Managing Editor Michal Zechariah published a review of Maayan Eitan’s Love (tr. by the author) at 3:am magazine and a review of Elizabeth Clark’s Boy Parts at The Rumpus. READ MORE…

Our Spring 2022 Issue Has Landed!

Individuals of the woodland canine persuasion run amok in our Spring 2022 issue, thanks to Theis Ørntoft and Nina Yargekov!

Welcome to our Spring 2022 edition, released just as Russia’s invasion enters a brutal new phase. We’ve been curating a space for writers in support of Ukraine in a new Saturday column. Now, we proudly bring you Andrii Krasnyashchikh’s letters from Kharkiv, Kate Tsurkan’s interview with Zenia Tompkins, and Ian Ross Singleton’s review of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine. Complemented by guest artist Shuxian Lee’s poignant cover, these pieces and the new issue remind us that if “humans are destructive”—as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it across so powerfully in his essay “Our Days in Paradise are Over”—“we are also an organising phenomenon in the cosmos.”

An absolute highlight amid new work from thirty-four countries, Ørntoft’s essay is itself an organizing phenomenon that deserves to be dwelt on. According to him, civilization “began with the delineation of a garden,” but capitalism has taken it to the point where every inch of planet Earth has been altered and nature no longer exists “out there”—no wonder, then, that his expedition to the West of Jutland yields zero sightings of wolves. Heavily mythologized across cultures, wolves most often represent danger, chaos, the unknown—yet, in the author’s telling, they also stand for the primeval and, therefore, a certain elusive real, in stark contrast to the various symbolisms thrust upon them. Ørntoft then inverts the anthropocentric paradigm that humans are used to—with them at the top of the food chain, even though they do not necessarily self-identify as animals—and asks us to consider what message wolves might hold for us instead.

Apart from Nina Yargekov’s uproarious adaptation of “Little Red Riding Wolf” for the age of the #MeToo movement—the obvious story with which Ørntoft’s nonfiction might be paired—“Our Days in Paradise are Over” echoes Nobel laureate Hermann Karl Hesse’s empathetic Weltanschauung in two new translations of his poems by Wally Swist; it also asks us to pay attention to the various animals conjured in this edition: from the suffering, captive bat in Bosnian author Aljoša Ljubojević’s “How We Started the War” to the suffering, liberated “Fish” in Georgian writer Goderdzi Chokheli’s story about a man who jumps into a lake and renounces his very own humanity along with the social contract it entails. Then there is the elusive boar in Pedro de Jesús’s slippery poem, in which various hunters discuss the “art of the hunt” only to miss the point; the cats with beautiful eyes in Agnieszka Taborska’s fascinating piece on surrealists vis-à-vis their chosen suicides, “yawn[ing] and stretch[ing] in all their dignity, distance, and above all their enormous indifference to the person standing there on the chair with her head in a noose.” READ MORE…

Bercer un poème: On Nursing Poetry in the Showcase Ù Ơ | SUO: A Poetic Exchange

Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

“What is language if it is not sound?”—Trần Thị NgH

Speaking of translation in one of the pre-recorded sessions of the poetic showcase Ù Ơ | SUO, writer Trần Thị NgH reminded the audience of the importance of sound in language. Sound, she argued, is the space in which an utterance bears meaning.

This focus on sound and other sensory aspects of poetry permeated the week-long Ù Ơ | SUO, which brought together poems in translation and multilingual works mixing Welsh, English, and Vietnamese, as well as panel discussions and visual and performative responses. This collaborative work was the result of a three-month residency for Welsh and Vietnamese women and non-binary writers.

Ù Ơ | SUO’s point of departure, according to Nhã Thuyên’s introduction, was the “familiar sounds of lullabies” and how they might serve as a clue to the “origins of poetic language and the role of women in transmission of language and memory within families.” The title of the showcase, which refers to the act of singing a lullaby, inspired me to experience this showcase through the dialectal metaphor of “bercer un poème“: cradling a poem as a mother would a crying child. The reader is also important to the “growth” of the piece: reading is how we cradle a poem. Nous sommes bercés par le poème, et nous berçons le poème—we are cradled by the poem, and we cradle the poem.

As I viewed the exhibition, Piaget’s theory of cognitive development came to mind. His theory deals with the nature of knowledge: how a child comes to acquire it, build it, and use it. According to Piaget’s framework, children go from experiencing the world through actions, to learning how to represent it through words, to expanding their logical thinking and reasoning. It isn’t that children know less, Piaget argued; they just think differently. This thinking “differently” is then a space where creative potential can emerge.

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

Because, as Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away."

Tired of doomscrolling? We think you’d like these staff recommendations—hailing from the UK, India, and Turkey. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like so many of us in this pandemic, my reading has turned to sci-fi and magical realism. When our world is wedged between the hybrid machination of zoom and an increasingly taxing everyday life, fantasy provides an escape into a world of pleasure. Perhaps no one has done this as masterfully as British author, Susanna Clarke, in her recent fantasy novel Piranesi. Set in a disenchanted world of The House, Piranesi, a futuristic scribe of sorts records his everyday life in an infinite universe consisting of severed statues, columns and fringe pockets of water. His universe is awfully lonely, yet he finds a way to narrate it with an uncanny curiosity. He has an endearing voice, which he often uses to enchant the only other member he interacts with, a dapper and sordid gentleman by the name of “The Other.” Together they enter a surreal journey searching for “Great and Secret Knowledge,” encountering the most mundane of objects along the way. Though The Other is not able to value this world in the same way Piranesi does, the latter often lends him his eyes to make him understand. The beauty of Clarke’s writing is not its construction of a highly centralized and systemized future universe, rather its focus on collapse and the journey that lurks between empty halls. I hope you give it a chance and let Piranesi guide your night.

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

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Our Winter 2022 Issue Is Here!

Featuring new work from a record 43 countries!

Shout it from the rooftops: Asymptote turns eleven today! We celebrate our 43rd issue with new work from a record 43 countries in our most bountiful edition yet. Highlights include an exclusive interview with acclaimed poet George Szirtes and a Flemish Literature Special Feature organized in partnership with Flanders Literature, showcasing new translations of International Booker Prize nominee Stefan Hertmans, YA superstar author Bart Moeyaert, and up-and-coming raconteur Rachida Lamrabet.

Our Winter 2022 edition not only puts the “world” in “world literature,” it also interrogates the meaning of it. Take the case of Aaron Zeitlin, the Yiddish poet who was stranded overseas when the Nazis invaded his native Poland and killed his entire family. Written in a language “half of whose speakers had been wiped off the face of the earth,” Zeitlin’s grief-stricken poetry appears to be without a world, and therefore can not, as Yeshua G.B. Tolle argues beautifully, be classified as world literature. In her fiction, Jasna Jasna Žmak imagines a similar apocalyptic fate for the speakers of her language in a thought experiment inspired by Barthes, only to emerge with a newfound appreciation for all the words in her language, including the ones she hates. After all, words can summon entire civilizations—even the bygone ones—as they do in Gesualdo Bufalino’s thrilling list of extinct professions (the lady with the bloodsuckers, among them!). “The disappearing world” is also the subject of visual artist—and the first public figure in Spain to openly discuss his HIV status—Pepe Espaliú’s devastating poems evoking his final days under a sky dense like “the mouth of black clouds.” By contrast, bilingual Kazakh poet Anuar Duisenbinov’s exuberant “overloved, overdosed” narrator “float[s] in exultation” through his “luminous and windy capital,” contemplating “the ability of speech to sprout.” As it turns out, speech does sprout everywhere all over the world. Alongside Duisenbinov, we’re thrilled to debut in English Emil-Iulian Sude, one of the first award-winning writers of Roma ethnicity in Romania; Rachid Djaïdani, a French filmmaker whose 1999 bestselling novel and classic of banlieue writing is only now available, thanks to frequent contributor Matt Reeck; and Kim Su-on, a young Korean writer whose dazzlingly atmospheric story is a masterclass in worldbuilding.

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The tagline of this eleventh anniversary edition is “The Worlds We Live In”—pointedly not “The World We Live In”—meant to express the simultaneity of all our myriad existences, such as those inhabited by George Szirtes, who discusses his new collection of poems, the state of Hungarian literature, and translation in the age of Brexit. Also working from the liminal space of migration is Jamaican-born artist Cosmo Whyte, who explains why Barbados’s recent renouncement of the Queen is only the first of many necessary steps in healing (since, according to him, there is no “post” to colonialism). Neske Beks also performs a necessary act toward healing on behalf of Black women everywhere by centering the story of Ann Lowe, the Black designer responsible for Jackie Kennedy’s bridal gown in 1953, in her retelling of haute couture’s history. Pair her 2020 essay sparked by an exhibition with Charlotte Van den Broeck’s nonfiction excavating the curious real-life case of the Princess Caraboo of Javasu aka Mary Wilcocks—who might very well be the first yellowface captured in any artistic medium (an 1817 oil painting that shared a moment with Van den Broeck at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in her last gallery visit before the pandemic). All of this is illustrated in talented Singaporean guest artist Yeow Su Xian (Shu)’s irresistible palette and forms—I dare you to say hers isn’t the most fun cover we’ve had in a while!

For more Asymptote goodness, subscribe to our newsletter or Book Club, follow us on FacebookTwitter, and our two Instagram accounts, and consider submitting work (Swedish-English translators take note: our recently announced call for submissions to a paid Swedish literature feature ends Mar 1). And of course, we’d be delighted if you’d like to come on board as a team member (apply by Feb 1) or, to honor our eleven full years in world literature perhaps, as one of our generous sustaining members! As always, thank you for your readership and support.

BECOME A SUSTAINING MEMBER TODAY

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

“Precise Tactility”: Polly Barton Interviewed by Xiao Yue Shan

Language is a source of great fear, but it's also a source of great joy and connection.

At page 124 of Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, I found myself smiling impossibly wide, reading out loud to the empty room: “Kyuki-kyuki . . . The sound of a pen writing on a whiteboard.” Part of the joy that pervades and grows in reading this “memoir-dictionary” is in its subtle invitation to speak: to feel, as the author says, the “sensory bombardment” of encountering each new word, and the world that arrives with it. Written in fifty essays that each orbits off—sometimes tangentially, sometimes straightforwardly—from one of Japanese language’s vast selection of onomatopoeic words, the book generates a curious, sensual portrait of Barton’s life in Japan as a young woman, informed by the Wittgensteinian notion of language being defined by its utility, and in similar spirit to Lyn Hejinian: “Language . . . nearly is our psychological condition.” Through explorations of how the myriad self comes to match and distinguish itself from the world in words, Fifty Sounds creates an ecstatic realm of what happens in, between, and across languages—and the people who speak them.

Barton is a prolific translator from the Japanese; her repertoire includes Akutagawa winners like Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden and bestsellers like Misumi Kubo’s So We Look to the Sky, as well as English PEN Awards for Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. Though we’ve spoken to her in the past about her translation work, I wanted to hear more about the linguistic and textual discoveries that catalysed this desire to work with language, in the quiet and admiring affinity between all people who love words and their secret conspirations. I spoke with Polly on-screen in our opposing time zones; she answered my questions in thoughtful bursts of speech that carried with them a vivid, various nature, her hands occasionally gesturing at the immeasurable distance between us, that which only language can attempt to breach.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Did Fifty Sounds begin in its current structure?

Polly Barton (PB): Not at all. I started working on it when I’d just got back to the UK after years of living in Japan, and at first, it was just notes for essays about the Japanese language. The inclusion of the onomatopoeia happened quite naturally, but the “fifty sounds” structure came about when I started writing the proposal for the [2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions] Essay Prize; I wanted to do it as a way of consolidating my thoughts, because I felt like there was meat in there and I was really enjoying writing about it, but it was kind of all over the place.

But the more I was writing, the more this concept started coming to me, and it seemed so out there that even while I was writing, I was thinking, can I do this? Can I write a memoir in fifty essays about Japanese onomatopoeia? Still, the callout for the contest said, “rewards ambitious writing,” so I was like, they want ambitious, I’ll give them ambitious. It’s funny because I am so grateful for that structure. It was just a crazy idea I hit upon, but I think it was very good for me to have that as a constraint, to start over fifty times—so I could do some sections like prose-poems, and a couple bits that are more academic.

XYS: Freedom dressed up as a constraint. There are definitely pieces that feel as though they could be portioned into separate texts, but because all the sections are encompassed in the umbrella of one experience, it feels cohesive.

PB: I don’t know if I intended this, but the experience of being in Japan, and learning Japanese, was so chaotic to me. I think a lot of people who learn a different language when they grew up and live in another culture—particularly one where they’re visibly different from most people around them—do have this real panoply of conflicting experiences, and the book is about embracing chaos in a way.

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Because Reading (Subtitles) Is What? Fundamental!

RuPaul’s Drag Race demands translation sensitive to global and local queer cultures.

In the twelve years since RuPaul’s Drag Race first premiered on the relatively unknown LGBTQIA+ cable channel Logo TV, the Emmy award-winning series has gained an immense global following and become one of the defining shows of our age. The reality TV show, which boasts thirteen seasons (along with six All Stars series), follows drag queens competing in a range of performance-based challenges to be crowned “America’s Next Drag Superstar.” More recently, the race has expanded overseas, with Spain becoming the latest in a series of international spinoffs, joining Thailand, the UK, Canada, Holland, and Australia/New Zealand. In its evolution from a niche talent show for US drag performers to a global cultural phenomenon, Drag Race has propelled a queer subculture from the margins to the mainstream and put drag performance in the international spotlight. In the journey to globalize the show, translation has played a key role in giving drag and LGBTQIA+ culture visibility around the world.

It is of course thanks to the subtitling and dubbing of Drag Race into multiple languages that the US original achieved global success and found audiences worldwide. For translators, capturing the nuances of the show is no small feat. Much of its entertainment relies on verbal and cultural humour, each episode packed with English-based puns, double-entendres, and innuendos that can be hard to translate. Similarly, the dialogue showcases slang terms, neologisms, and catchphrases that are deeply rooted in the drag and LGBTQIA+ culture of the US. Take “mothertuckin’,” for example. In drag culture, tucking, used here to rhyme with a certain English swearword, refers to a taping practice used by drag queens to make their genital anatomy appear more feminine. Recreating this kind of wordplay poses a challenge for translators working in a context with a less developed drag culture and associated vocabulary.

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What’s New with the Crew? (February 2021)

From writing columns to publishing translations, we’ve been keeping busy!

Assistant Editor (Fiction) Andreea Scridon will have a poetry pamphlet published in 2022 with Broken Sleep Books; in addition, she will be featured in Art and Letters’ anthology 14 International Younger Poets‚ forthcoming this summer.

Copy Editor Anna Aresi has begun writing a monthly column on children’s literature in translation for Italian kid lit blog Scaffale Basso.

Nonfiction Editor Bassam Sidiki published a poem in Counterlock Journal.

Chamini Kulathunga, Editor-at-Large for Sri Lanka, published her interview with Liyanage Amarakeerthi on Hopscotch Translation on February 9, 2021.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, has joined Cicada, a new literary magazine featuring nuanced and inclusive writing; it also welcomes translations.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania & Moldova, has initiated an internationally funded project on digital literacy, DigiLiBeRo, spearheaded together with Ana Iolanda Voda and Roxana Patras.  READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

Our section editors present their favorite works from our Winter 2021 issue!

Our Winter 2021 issue marks a decade of diving into the languages of the world (our archive now boasts 113 of them!) in all their incredible singularity and variegation. Spanning thirty-one countries, this milestone edition feels like a fitting way to honor a decade of hard work behind the scenes. After hearing from our blog editors last week, let’s pass the mic to the very editors who had a hand in putting together the issue itself.

Is it a Comedy? Is it a Tragedy?” Thomas Bernhard asks in our debut issue from January 2011. Ten years later, Brazilian author Adelice Souza’s fever-dream of a story (in Padma Viswanathan’s pitch-perfect translation) provides a direct enjoinder: “The play wasn’t a comedy, nor was it a tragedy . . . It was a drama very specifically for those two women.” Just as in Bernhard’s story, the point is not the play at all—we hardly know what the play is about, other than the fact that its two actresses play a lonely woman and her dog, and that tragedy ensues when one demands to switch roles with the other. In contrast to Bernhard, who focuses squarely on the theatre-goer, Souza makes it all about the two actresses whose eight years of traveling with the play to multiple cities have “put them through every type of relationship.” It’s not a story one imagines being plotted out; rather, the work feels like it has been ejected, like toothpaste from a tube, sentence by exhilarating sentence. In the “Brave New World Literature” Special Feature, we also come full circle but in a different way via the return of frequent contributor Jeremy Tiang, who debuted as a translator in our first issue. Combining pop-cultural references with theory, “The World Is Not Enough” is full of quotable gems, but nowhere is Tiang more on-point than when he muses, “Perhaps if the dominant anglophone culture actually acknowledged itself to be part of the world, rather than treating ‘world literature’ as a spice rack to save itself from total blandness, more than three percent of books published in the United States would be in translation?” Finally, anyone who is curious about the workings of a magazine of world literature other than our own will find plenty of food for thought in John Freeman’s riveting piece on how he remade Granta into a global publication.

—Lee Yew Leong, Fiction Editor and ”Brave New World Literature“ Special Feature Editor

Max Rojas is a constant enthusiasm of mine and so I was thrilled to showcase a pretty sizable excerpt from Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz’s translation—the very first in English—in all its shining, breathless glory. Even though it’s a mere sliver of a doorstop-sized poem, it’s an excellent sample of Rojas’ talent and an overdue introduction for the Anglosphere. The language of Bodies is both baroque and ephemeral, rugged and philosophical, and its tone swings between that of a theologico-political treatise and a declaration of war. It’s some of this last century’s densest and most sophisticated Spanish-language verse, and some of the most woefully unknown.

—Garrett Phelps, Poetry Editor READ MORE…